Six years of coping with the decision to get a PhD - the end is nigh...

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Holy shit, it's been more than a year...

I can't believe it's been more than a year since I've last posted! I've thought about writing for some time, but just haven't done it until now. I actually just read my last post from March of last year, forgot that I was the one who wrote it, and thought what a good writer that person was...I'm fairly tipsy at the moment because we went to Hopcat Detroit to celebrate my PI's homecoming from India. He was awarded a Fulbright scholarship and had been in India for 5 months. In the meantime, my lab-mate and I both had birthdays, so he took us out for lunch (and beers) to belatedly celebrate our acceleration towards death.

So, what's happened since I last wrote? Hmm, let me think (it's a bad sign when I have to stop and think about what I've done over the past 13 months). I suppose the biggest thing was my foot surgery in September of 2014. I had surgery on my right foot to fix the damage I had done by dropping a heavy glass casserole dish on my big toe joint several years ago. I had a bone chip in the joint space and had developed arthritis that made it hard to walk. Every time I took a step and my toes flexed on push-off, it felt like I had broken glass for synovial fluid. Every single step, every single day for 6 years or so. It got to the point that I had changed my body mechanics so much that I (probably) tore the meniscus in my right knee while playing laser tag at a birthday party with kids my son's age. I got my crippled ass beat by those little punks. Even now, after I've recovered from surgery and had several weeks of physical therapy, lost some weight (yay!) and gained some strength through exercise - my functional left calf is a full 1/2" bigger in diameter than my gimpy right calf. It's crazy! I didn't realize what difference 6 + years of accommodations would make on my legs. I still have almost constant pain in my right foot when I walk, but now it varies from pretty intense (fairly infrequently) to damn near nonexistent (happening more and more these days). It's a definite improvement over pretty intense pain with every step I took, every single day. I might even be able to briefly wear high heels at some point soon! Before the surgery, my toes could not flex enough to wear even a 1" heel without excruciating pain. I'll likely never be able to wear 6" stilettos, but that's okay. I don't really want to feel like an amazon, looking down, literally, at my husband.